Service Pack 25.001 for List & Label and Report Server
The Service Pack introduces new features, various improvements and corrections. The following is an overview of the features and improvements in the Service Pack.
.NET
Miscellaneous Treats in List & Label 25
As with every new version, we have updated List & Label in a lot of different places to make it smoother to use, more modern and accessible. So to continue with this tradition, here are some treats in List & Label 25 you might have overlooked so far.
Connecting Mattermost to Blizz Meetings
As we all are affected by the infamous COVID-19 outbreak I assume many of you are working from their home offices just as we do. We had the luck (aka foresight) to prepare this early on so we were up and running in less than a day. Nevertheless, once we started, there were a couple of challenges we were facing. I thought I'd share some nuggets here that might be useful to you.
Should You Migrate from .NET Framework? – List & Label with .NET Core 3.1 Support
In May 2019, Microsoft announced that it will no longer develop the existing .NET Framework. So the current version 4.8 will be the last release. From now on, the company will concentrate on the further development of .NET Core. For developers, the question arises: Is the release of .NET Core 3.1 a good time to migrate from the .NET Framework? The good news is that you don't have to do without List & Label when migrating.
Adding JSON to the Available Export Formats
List & Label has supported a number of text based export formats for quite a while. You can have XML, CSV and layout TXT export in different variants. That way, you can use List & Label as a convenient way to convert your data from one of the supported data sources to something you can use in other applications again. But one very popular format was missing so far that's been around for quite a while: Java Script Object Notation aka JSON.
New GraphQL Data Source, Webhooks & more | Report Server 25 Improvements Part 2
As promised in our first blogpost about the innovations of Report Server 25, here comes the second part, including some very interesting features like Webhooks, connection string management or import/export of settings.
Supporting ZUGFeRD 2.0 in PDF Export
Version 1.0 of the electronic invoice data format ZUGFeRD for the exchange of invoices has already been supported. For List & Label 25, the specification of version 2.0, officially released in March 2019, is now also supported.
Full Support for .NET Core 3.0
.NET Standard and .NET Core have been around for a while now. We jumped the bandwagon early and offered beta support since LL23 while officially supporting the new framework since List & Label 24. With the advent of .NET Core 3.0, Microsoft announced that the .NET 4.x releases will be the last of their kind and .NET Core 3.0 – which will later simply be called .NET and will be named ".NET 5" in its next release – is the place to go. We're already there.
Keeping Groups of Table Lines Together
Continuing our quest to make the table object more versatile and powerful in LL25, we added an important tweak to the way table lines are kept together. Before, you just had the choice between keeping all lines together or none. That means, if the output for a single record stretched over a couple of pages and consisted of several line definitions, there was hardly ever a way to get the wrapping "right".
Adding Signature Support to the Email Module
This has been another great suggestion from our community at Idea Place. While the mail module is quite flexible and can send mails via SMTP, MAPI and XMAPI, and can either use the client's mail dialog or a custom, built in dialog, there was no way to append Outlook standard signatures to the sent mails so far. Microsoft has finally declined the request to add this feature to Outlook's MAPI implementation. So there was room for improvement.
